A portion of the disclosure of the patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The owner, International Business Machines Corporation, has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by any one of the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files of records of any country, but otherwise reserves all rights whatsoever.
This application is related to a copending application entitled Navigation Method for Dynamically Generated HTML Pages, filed on even date herewith, which is incorporated herein by reference, in its entirety.
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of computer data communications and more specifically to a method and system for providing dynamically generated Hyper Text Markup Language (xe2x80x9cHTMLxe2x80x9d) formatted reports from large amounts of data which is extracted from a Standard Query Language (xe2x80x9cSQLxe2x80x9d) database. The predominant current usage of the present inventive HTML formatted reports generation method is in the customized generation of reports over the internet, or like data communications channels.
2. Background Art
One of the uses to which the internet is applied is the querying of data bases which are available over the internet. The accessing of data bases over the internet presents some problems that are not present when a user accesses a data base directly at a local computer. Primary among these is that connection time must be limited over the internet in order to maximize the available bandwidth of the server, internet service provider (xe2x80x9cISPxe2x80x9d) facilities, network communications means, and the like.
One method that has been used in the prior art to use a common gateway interface (xe2x80x9cCGIxe2x80x9d) program to query the database and to produce a report which is then returned to the requesting user. This method is, however, slow and requires a great deal of processing time. Moreover, once a report is generated it must either be kept in the server""s memory (which will require a very great amount of storage space when many such custom reports are generated) or else the entire process will have to be repeated each time such a report is requested.
It would desirable to have a method for generating and providing data base reports over the internet which is both relatively quick and relatively economical of internet and server resources. However, to the inventors"" knowledge, no such method or means has existed in the prior art.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method for generating data base reports which will minimize repetitive operations each time such reports are requested. It is still another object of the present invention to provide a method for generating data base reports which will require less server storage space as compared to saving such reports after they are first generated.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a method for generating data base reports which is easy to use and reliable in operation.
Briefly, the inventive method separates the data extraction/processing step from the report formatting step by adding an intermediate step to write the culled data into what is called a xe2x80x98intermediate filesxe2x80x99, which use a meta language to describe the data. Then, on demand, a variety of HTML reports can be dynamically generated by parsing the metadata statements and data from the intermediate files. All subsequent requests to view these reports are dynamically generated from the intermediate files. The metadata statements efficiently describe the data, in that multiple reports may be generated from a set of metadata statements. Using a unique file format, unnecessary reprinting of data in the intermediate files is avoided. Such intermediate files require far less storage space in the server than would be required to store pregenerated reports. However, the provision of the intermediate files will greatly enhance performance when a report is requested, since it will not be necessary to query the entire database to obtain the information necessary to generate the report.
An advantage of the present invention is that the amount of server storage capacity that is required in order to quickly provide data base reports is reduced.
A further advantage of the present invention is that the speed of producing reports is increased as compared to culling the required data from the data base upon each request therefor.
Still another advantage of the present invention is that data base information from essentially any type of data base can be made available to essentially any desired user over the internet.
These and other objects and advantages of the present invention will become clear to those skilled in the art in view of the description of the best presently known mode of carrying out the invention and the industrial applicability of the preferred embodiment as described herein and as illustrated in the several figures of the drawing.